So, Street Fighter x Tekken came out and met with widespread acclaim. Good for Capcom. Now it's Namco Bandai's turn to produce a fighting game crossover that follows up on an idea that once looked impossible. When might the Tekken company's answer be coming out? The guy who made SFxT has no idea.

Street Fighter. Tekken. Game titles followed by periods. These are the sort of weighty things on…
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"Honestly, I haven't seen a single thing about it!" said Capcom's Yoshinori Ono about Tekken x Street Fighter, in an interview with The Guardian. "[ Namco's Katsuhiro ] Harada is notoriously slow at making games, so it might be 2018 before that comes out!," Ono continued. It's clear that he was joking about the supposed release date but the recently hospitalized dev lead on SFxT was serious about other topics in the interview. About SFxT's controversial gem system, he says:

With the gem system, we wanted to add a layer of personalisation that had never been seen before in fighting games," says Ono. "No longer should customisation be purely cosmetic; it should be about fusing your own play style into characters, and that's what we've managed to do with the gem system.

"No gem is more powerful than another, and it is all about finding out what works for you as a player and you personally. New players to the genre can utilise Assist gems in order to cover their weaknesses, while more experienced players can utilise Boost gems to increase the parameters of their characters.

When asked about where he see the fighting genre possibly heading in the future, Ono answers:

… we want more and more people to become interested in fighting games so that we can grow the genre. It would be nice if we could create a means of giving new players an easy way to get acquainted with the existing fighting game community. If we can include more social features in the future titles that could help grow the communities. That would be ideal.

In case you're wondering, this interview happened before Ono's recent hospitalization. Hopefully, the producer's recuperating and waiting on Harada and crew to craft respond with their own playable mash-up.